What 30 Years of Customized Morocco Tours Have Taught Me I have been designing private and customized journeys through Morocco for more than thirty years. During that time, I have probably created more than a thousand individual itineraries.
Some I barely remember.
Others have never left me.
What I remember most is rarely the hotel we used or how many nights we spent in Marrakech. I remember the people: families travelling across three generations, couples celebrating important moments in their lives, travelers tracing their heritage, people fascinated by architecture or music, adventurous travelers wanting mountains and desert, and others who simply wanted enough time to sit somewhere and understand where they were.
After all these years, I have learned something very simple:
A customized tour does not begin with the itinerary. It begins with the traveler.
Fourteen People, One Family, Fourteen Different Travelers One of my earliest lessons came in 1994, when Sarah Tours was still a young and largely unknown company. Mr. Johnson asked me to design a grand tour of Morocco for his family. Fourteen participants ranged in age from nine to seventy-three.
At first glance, this was one private group requiring one itinerary.
It wasn't.
It was fourteen people experiencing Morocco differently.
Children can become fascinated very quickly, but they can also become bored just as quickly. A long historical explanation that captivates a grandfather may mean very little to his nine-year-old granddaughter.
Teenagers present another challenge. You cannot simply drag them through monuments and expect enthusiasm because the adults have declared the places important. They need opportunities to participate, discover, move and develop their own relationship with the destination.
Adults may happily endure longer driving days, extensive walking and detailed cultural visits. Older travelers often still possess the curiosity and adventurous spirit they had decades earlier, while their bodies may quietly ask for a different pace.
My responsibility was not to decide which generation should compromise.
It was to create a journey where everyone belonged.
For fifteen days, we travelled through Morocco's imperial cities, mountains and Sahara.
I sometimes felt I had to become three guides in one, changing pace, changing language, changing how I introduced a place, letting some people rest while keeping others engaged, and constantly watching whether the journey was working for the family rather than simply whether we were following the itinerary.
At the end of the tour in Essaouira, the family thanked me warmly. I was delighted that the journey had worked. I could not have imagined the real answer would come almost thirty years later.
The Nine-Year-Old Traveler Came Back The youngest granddaughter on that journey grew up.
Nearly thirty years later, at thirty-nine, she contacted Sarah Tours.
She remembered my name. She remembered Sarah Tours. Most remarkably, she remembered details of the Morocco journey she had taken as a child.
Now she had a family of her own, a husband and three children, and she wanted to bring them to Morocco.
She asked me to recreate the journey her grandfather gave his family, with one addition of her own: a night in Chefchaouen.
So I found myself customizing the journey again, this time for the next generation.
That experience changed the way I think about family travel.
A child should never be treated as an additional passenger on an adult itinerary.
The nine-year-old may remember the journey longer than anyone else.
Customization Is Not Adding and Removing Destinations
Today, the word customized is used very easily in tourism.
Choose your hotel. Add another night. Remove a city. Upgrade the room. Select some optional activities. These are certainly forms of customization.
But after decades of designing private tours, I believe genuine customization goes much deeper.
Before deciding where someone should travel, I want to understand who is travelling.
What interests them? How old are the travelers? How active are they? Is this their first visit to Morocco? Do they prefer history, food, architecture, music, hiking, photography, Jewish heritage, Islamic civilization, contemporary life, rural communities, the Sahara, or some combination of these? How much driving are they comfortable with? Do they enjoy full days, or do they need time simply to wander? And perhaps most importantly:
Why are they coming to Morocco? The answers change the journey.
Sometimes Eight Friends Need Eight Different Moroccos
In 2019, Michael Epstein from Maryland contacted me.
He told me that Sarah Tours had been highly recommended by friends I had taken through Morocco several years earlier. Michael and three other couples, all close friends, wanted to make a seventeen-day journey through Morocco. Jewish heritage mattered to them, but it wasn't their only interest. They were deeply curious about Moroccan history, anthropology, and culture.
Michael asked me to lead the journey personally.
By then I had largely retired from tour leading. Over the years, I had trained excellent Moroccan guides to accompany Sarah Tours travelers.
But Michael told me that he had always wanted to see Morocco and believed this might be his last major journey. I decided to go. Again, customization meant more than designing a route.
Eight friends did not necessarily have eight identical interests simply because they were travelling together.
We explored Morocco's Jewish heritage, but we also talked about Islam, history, architecture, anthropology, contemporary Morocco, and the complicated relationships between cultures.
We sometimes disagreed, even about politics.
That was fine.
Travel should not require people to agree with one another.
It should give them enough trust and curiosity to listen to one another.
During seventeen days together, something changed. We stopped feeling like a tour leader and eight clients. We became friends travelling through Morocco together.
That friendship continued long after the journey ended.
The Most Important Tool in Customized Travel Is Attention After more than a thousand tailor-made journeys, people sometimes expect me to have discovered a complicated formula for designing the perfect Morocco itinerary.
I haven't.
I have learned something much more useful: Pay attention.
Watch the child who has stopped listening.
Notice when an older traveler is becoming tired before they have to announce it to everyone.
Recognize when someone is fascinated by something that was supposed to be a ten-minute stop.
Don't drag them away just because the itinerary says it is time to leave.
Listen when a traveler keeps asking questions about music, agriculture, architecture, religion, or everyday life. They are telling you what their Morocco journey should become.
And leave room for surprise.
Some of the most memorable experiences I have helped create were never written in the original itinerary.
That is why I have never believed that a customized journey should become a rigid contract with the road.
The itinerary gives us direction. The traveler gives it meaning.
What Sarah Tours Means by a Customized Morocco Tour When we design a private journey through Morocco today, thirty years of experience sit quietly behind it.
Not because we know every hotel.
Not because we have discovered some secret list of attractions.
And not because we believe there is one perfect Morocco itinerary.
Quite the opposite.
After all these years, I know that there isn't one.
There is a Morocco for the family travelling with children.
There is another for the seventy-year-old who still wants adventure but needs a gentler walking pace.
There is a Morocco for the historian, the photographer, the hiker, the musician, the food lover and the traveler tracing family heritage.
There is a Morocco for someone visiting for three days from Spain and another for someone willing to spend three weeks crossing mountains, oases and desert.
Our job is not to fit all of them into the same Morocco.
Our job is to listen carefully enough to discover which Morocco belongs to their journey.
Perhaps that is what thirty years of customized travel has taught me.
I once thought I was designing itineraries.
I now understand that I was designing relationships between people and places.
And when that relationship is right, something remarkable can happen.
Sometimes a nine-year-old girl remembers it for thirty years.
And one day, she brings her own children back.
